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JoeyRox writes "The recent decline in Facebook's popularity with teenagers appears to be worsening. A Global Social Media Impact study of 16 to 18 year olds found that many considered the site 'uncool' and keep their profiles alive only to keep in touch with older relatives, for whom the site remains popular. Researches say teens have switched to using WhatsApp, Snapchat, and Twitter in place of Facebook."

I've always considered Facebook to be a little "transient", short, not for real conversation. But WhatsApp, Snapchat, and Twitter? Is this an indication that kids today have lost the ability to have meaningful communication? If it can't be said in 140 chars or less it's not worth communicating? There is a discussion at Balloon Juice [balloon-juice.com] about the current way of raising kids: Apparently face-to-face social interaction is passe* with the kids these days, and school shootings are up.

I've always considered Facebook to be a little "transient", short, not for real conversation. But WhatsApp, Snapchat, and Twitter?

Who cares? FB got enough users to go IPO and exit. In the time it took for that to happen, its users migrated to other services, just in time for them to create profitable exits for their founders and ultimately fuck over their retail investors when the userbase shifts to the next cool thing.

The only business model is passing notes in class. Email and USENET let you fuck around while looking like you were working. Then came GeoCities, profitably exited to Yahoo. Then came Instant messaging systems, same sort of pump/dump deal. (Somewhere around here phone companies discovered there was money to be made in texting, which was just another way to pass notes in class.) Then came MySpace and Facebook, and Instagram. Then came Twitter, basically a way to monetize texting and take it back from the phone companies. Now it's Snapchat, who promises to let NSA and anyone clever enough to rename a misnamed.JPG back to ".JPG" keep archives, but since most of its userbase (see above -- passing notes in class!) doesn't care, because they don't know enough about technology to see beyond "the client app autodeletes after viewing".

The more it changes, the more it stays the same, and the less I want anything to do with this industry anymore, except to daytrade the stocks in it. You can't invest in it, because fads only last 3-5 years, and it takes 2-4 of those years to go from startup to IPO exit. (Any bets on when GitHub IPOs, jumps its shark, and everyone switches to Mercurial? Fuck, maybe there's a fad/pendulum effect there, and in ten years we'll abandon DVCS for centralized versioning systems once thought obsolete, sorta like how we moved from decentralized application hosting of local executables on personal computers back to SaaS and the fuckin' cloud.)

The more it changes, the more it stays the same, and the less I want anything to do with this industry anymore,

Why are you so jaded? If email works, then stick to it. It's not as if anyone is forcing you to follow the fashionistas? One of the beauties of Unix is that you can take a Unix programmer from the 1980s and drop him in 2014 and he'll still be productive. True, he wouldn't know anything about GUIs (which change with time) but the core has remained largely the same. The same can be said about all core technologies around today.

When "everyone" includes your parents, grandparents, your aunts and uncles, your SO's parents, your teachers, and the pastor who baptized you as an infant, then "that thing everyone else is doing" suddenly stops being cool and becomes the thing to scorn and stay away from. Getting caught or not has nothing to do with it, based on the teens I've seen and the stories we all see circulating from time to time. It's simply a matter of it not being the place where teens hang out since it's the place where everyon

I don't know if youngsters use SnapChat because of its privacy aspects; perhaps they are simply using it because it is easy to use and/or popular. It could just be a flavour-of-the-month thing, but who knows: perhaps FB was right to want to acquire SnapChat (do we start abbreviating that as "SC" now?), and perhaps SnapChat was right to decline what seemed like a very generous offer from them.

Then again, what SnapChat lacks (and Facebook has) is a "stack". If one service holds ones content, contacts, communication and even identity to other services, one might be slow to switch. But a stand-alone messaging service is easily ditched, or used alongside another one.

Personally I find that Facebook has too many features. It sort of reminds me of Microsoft Office with this endless parade of new tiny and mostly useless features.

I think that this is where the snapchats and twitters do so very well. With a very simple core feature set it is not hard to keep focused on what works. But with facebook it almost seems like they don't want to leave anything out just in case some competitor comes along and eats their lunch.

I think it all boils down to the question: what is Facebook? With the highly successful recent upstarts that is an easy thing to answer. But with facebook the question is actually quite complex. It is very difficult for facebook to be so much to so many.

To sum it up they have lost their 30 second elevator pitch. But maybe with this information Facebook will realize that their core audience aren't teenyboppers but adults and thus will focus their feature set in that direction.

It's more now what it's always been; a clusterfuck. From a usability standpoint it's like GT5's main menu but scrolling to infinity. I deleted my first account long ago and my second one only echoes my Twitter feed. Google+ isn't much better, sadly. A clean, intuitive interface would do wonders for both services.

To me, FB was becoming too much of an "all eggs in one basket" type of site. It handles authentication for third parties, a gaming platform, messaging, calendars, contact lists. None of this is something unique to FB, because other applications or websites have been doing this.

Then there are the concerns about privacy. At least SnapChat offers the illusion of privacy which people are wanting since there have been stories and stories about FB data falling into the wrong hands [1].

[1]: One example personally was someone tagging me while I was browsing a humidor in a FB pic. A week later the health insurance company I had at the time then sent a demand letter that I either go for a physical or pay smoker's rates.

That claim I find rather hard to believe. So much so that I don't, without it being backed up.Does anyone have any evidence for this happening?

I was about to ask the same thing. If it were try then it could be an incredibly powerful weapon in the war for privacy. A massive and crippling lawsuit could finally put some kind of limit on how far privacy violation can go.

Unfortunately, like 82% of anecdotes and 94% off statistics on Slashdot it is probably made up.

Whoa, footnote [1] is a little too egregious for me to let it pass unremarked. Why in the world could the insurance company see the picture? How long was it from posting to reaction? Which company was this? (I'm not inclined to reward this kind of behavior)

For one, the logical leap they made is huge, and for another, that's some serious monitoring of online traffic for this to be true. I have to admit I'm a bit skeptical, not that I'm sure they wouldn't love to do this.

The way some have raved about FB's supposedly dirt simple website design, I thought I was the only one who found FB's interface poor and confusing. Somehow, reading an invite or message doesn't always clean up the list of new things FB likes to nag you about, and logging in doesn't always take you to a home page. Terminology is a bit misleading. I've frequently ended up in the interface for searching out and adding new friends while hunting around for something else entirely.

Personally I find that Facebook has too many features. It sort of reminds me of Microsoft Office with this endless parade of new tiny and mostly useless features.

It's not that Facebook is complicated. It's that most of the new features involve either advertising or collecting data about you. They have value for Facebook, not the user. Facebook is pulling a Myspace. Worse, they're doing it in the phone era, where ads are more annoying due to the limited screen real estate.

Snapchat is still in the "no ads, no revenue" phase, when it's fun to use. Originally, Google didn't have ads. Originally, Facebook didn't have ads. Until recently, Twitter did not have ads. Once

Many old people prefer methods of communication where they decide exactly who the recipients are, each and every time. And where the history is available no matter how much time has passed, or what service you now use, because it adheres to open standards.Like e-mail.

When, a couple of years ago, I predicted that Facebook would face the same fate as Myspace, Livejournal and others, I was ridiculed. Facebook was the best thing since sliced bread. Well, folks, do you still think the same now?

I'm old and I don't use facebook. I had an account about 3 years ago and after about a year I had logged in maybe 5 or 6 times. I kept getting all this ridiculous spam from everywhere so I just deleted it. What the fuck is up with the farm game anyway? People actually play that?

Lol wasn't that the point of this article? And every comment afterward??

Yes but where people previously didn't read the f*ing article they now no longer read the f*ing/. summary before making informed comments on the subject. Thus the gist of the/. summary bears repeating in abbreviated form because anything longer than 4 words is likely to overtax the attention span of some of some of the youngest generation of/. posters. Come to think of it he's actually kind of pushing the envelope by using 5 words and no SMS-speak.

I'd imagine the lack of social networking elements is the draw. People assume that today's kids don't care about privacy, but I get the sense that most of them want their social connections to be more ephemeral than Facebook encourages. With Facebook, defriending someone could be slightly embarrassing, so I just accumulate a pile of people I used to know and may not identify with anymore, with potentially added stress if I delete them. With a messaging app, I message you, or I don't. You can add all the privacy features you want to Facebook, but the possibly preferable alternative is not putting all the effort into maintaining a profile.

" Social networking " is an intelligence gathering tool under cover of being practical . All it does is gather data about you.Cut off the umbilical.tying you to the secret services and police forces . Shut those accounts down , wipe the data out and never get fooled again by the Americans into trusting them with a single bit of data.

Jabber for n00bz. Seriously. WhatsApp uses the Jabber protocol, wrapped behind an app,
with your cell phone number as the portion of your handle before the @.
And an "image upload" feature that posts images to a server and sends a link over chat.

I guess what's going on here is... Snapchat and WhatsApp are SMS text messaging replacements;
the extra attribute that the kids like is that the Snapchat conversations are forcibly destroyed within seconds after they were made ----

Today, however, I feel like a luddite. I don't use Facebook. I don't use instagram or snapchat or whatsapp. I read one or two twitter accounts, but don't have an account myself. My wife is totally hooked on Facebook, and I'm now I'm the one complaining about spending so much time on the computer!

Obviously teens and older people have different interests and different views, so they need different forms of expression. It is good that the separation occured by natural selection and not by advertising.

Teenagers want and need to find a place of their own, to form their own subculture. A new technology comes along, they jump on board because they are highly adaptable, their parents less, often much less, so. But after five years the teenagers are getting out of their teens and those entering the teens once again need to find their own space. Therefore, there can be no permanent place for teens unless it puts off older people joining or staying. Anyway, someone needs to beta test the new communications paradigms.

After hiding those who consistently (long-term) wouldn't participate on my posts, may it be in terms of comments or thumbs-up, I've proceeded to also hide friends who only "share" links such as those from 9gag or Youtube or Facebook pages. Problem now is that my Newsfeed looks nearly static for 24-36 hours! Facebook is indeed dead to me but that's after removing the selfish/narcissists and true time-wasters.

I'm now wondering why I even joined Facebook. It used to be ok and then one day the Newsfeed was changed to default to "Most popular" posts rather than chronological. So much for not putting a view-count on your Profile page or under your photos because somehow management didn't want Facebook to be some MySpace popularity contest sh***y website. That new Newsfeed is a true contradiction to that ancient moto.

There was never an abundance of teenagers on Facebook. It was initially for college students, and it branched out to older users. It has never been a good tool for young people living with their parents (for obvious reasons).

I'm looking for the research and see.....none. The credentials of the researchers is impressive at first glance, but there is no research. This whole thing looks like a hypothesis without any real research. The entire premise is very interesting, and some of their ideas are worth PROVING. I can't wait to see the results.

This just in. Teenagers don't want to hang out with their parents or older relatives.

Guess what, that will always be the case. MySpace died a grizly death as soon as Moms everywhere started dropping friend requests. Facebook is pretty much just the lazy person's way of sending email/IM. It's cool to be able to see what people are up to, but I find myself using it less and less as time goes on.

These are people whose social network consists of persons they see just about every day of their life, i.e., their classmates and family. It's not surprising they don't find facebook useful. What is surprising is that they find any other online social network particularly useful. I imagine twitter has more to do with keeping up with celebrities/bands and snapchat/whatsapp is really not a social network so much as it is an improved texting interface which probably works well for intercommunication between small high school cliques.

The reason they use facebook to keep in touch with older relatives is because older relatives are the only people they have developed significant relationships with who are not immediately accessible. When these same students go out-of-state to various colleges, Facebook is going to be a much better way to keep track of each others lives, interact casually with new people (i.e. facebook can be very passive, it doesn't require as much direct activity as a chat program, can just go ahead and friend that guy/girl you maybe like), and keep track of clubs and related events.

But I have seen some die off in facebook popularity. People still check it but they don't post nearly as much. I personally blame privacy issues and the 'like' feature. The latter because it's makes it a popularity contest. Some people are secure enough to not care, others are going to be put off when certain friends post and get 100 likes and they get 2, or even if they do get enough likes stress about keeping it up, or whatever. Best just not to post and avoid the stress of whether your post will be well-received by the community. Any contest is ultimately only going to be participated in by people who do well at the contest, assuming there is any choice in participating.

Unfortunately researcher is almost right. I have a teenage relative that only uses instagram and snapchat. She has a Facebook profile but that's only because myself and other "older" relatives use Facebook.

Funny, I just had a conversation with the same answer from my low 20-somethings sister. She never uses Facebook and chats with instagram and snapchat. Seems inefficient, but maybe that's just me!

She does have a twitter account--a marketing course in one of her college classes required all the students to open a twitter account. If THAT'S not the death knell of a social network (professors ordering students to open an account!), I don't know what is.

She does have a twitter account--a marketing course in one of her college classes required all the students to open a twitter account. If THAT'S not the death knell of a social network (professors ordering students to open an account!), I don't know what is.

I don't think a professor can demand that of the students. What if a student cannot accept the EULA of Twitter? Will the school refund the tuition and other expenses incurred before knowing about this requirement?

She does have a twitter account--a marketing course in one of her college classes required all the students to open a twitter account. If THAT'S not the death knell of a social network (professors ordering students to open an account!), I don't know what is.

I don't think a professor can demand that of the students. What if a student cannot accept the EULA of Twitter? Will the school refund the tuition and other expenses incurred before knowing about this requirement?

No different than if an engineering student felt they couldn't accept the EULA of Matlab. These are the standard tools of the profession and if a student is unable to bring himself to use a profession's standard toolset then it is much cheaper to find out after paying for a few courses than after completing an entire degree program.

I disagree. Technically the first prostitute wasn't a prostitute until she'd done the deed, and that didn't happen until she'd marketed her wares. Marketing is the oldest profession, prostitution a very close second.;-)

Given many (most?) major companies and organizations maintain an active Twitter presence operated by their PR or customer relations department? Yes.

Given that it only takes one bad (or mistaken/misread) tweet from a major company that could potentially disrupt millions in revenue, or even ruin their image permanently, I'm rather surprised that the organizations own lawyers haven't recommended it to be removed due to the liability*.

We've seen things go horribly wrong. Plenty of times. Some are forgiven. Most are not. All are remembered permanently thanks to the internet.

* How long before social media liability insurance policies are written? I'll give it another 15 seconds. Watch and see. I promise you it's coming.

I was having similar thoughts. Thanks for speaking my mind so clearly.

ALL social media sites are simply fads. There is not one that will stand the test of time. Facebook selling stock? Cool - Suckerburg really got one over on all the greedy fools with money to gamble. It certainly isn't going to last as long as MS, Apple, or Google. Facebook isn't the new IBM, or even Timex. Bars, pubs, and other social meeting places come and go. Facebook offers nothing truly special, unless they start serving free beer.

I think the inefficiency is part of the point, honestly. I personally dislike Facebook exactly because it has tried to be where you contact everyone you know, regardless of the context, and I simply don't want to spend the time to curate a stark divide between sharing with coworkers and friends when I don't share that much on Facebook in the first place. At this point in my life, it's like my contact list, except that it posts cat videos.

The old Facebook dismissal is that if you want share something with your real friends, you pick up the phone. I think that's the slightly wrong way to look at it, but it has a point. It's a bit of signaling, actually, that is accomplished by using the phone or any more involved means of contact. If I take the time to learn your details in a completely new or inefficient contact system, it means that messages from me are more likely to be significant because there's a greater barrier to me contacting you and I clearly put more effort into it that pulling up your profile on Facebook.

The old Facebook dismissal is that if you want share something with your real friends, you pick up the phone. I think that's the slightly wrong way to look at it, but it has a point. It's a bit of signaling, actually, that is accomplished by using the phone or any more involved means of contact.

This is exactly what google+ excels at. Having circles of friends is much closer to the way we live . Of course, the circles are very small, since no one else uses google+.Hmm, this is also closer to real life too:(

For those interested in photography though, check it out. It is worth it.

If efficiency was cool, Linux would have been developed in the 1960s, all airlines would be blended-wing, with waveriders being next year, minimum gas mileage for new cars would be 100 mpg at 100 mph, fast food would be fast (and healthy), the Tea Party would be banned by law, teenagers would have memorized everything published on the Blue Zones and ebooks would be in LuaLaTeX format, not a subset of HTML.

If efficiency was cool, Linux would have been developed in the 1960s...

Of course, you realize that Unix development [wikipedia.org] started in the mid 1960s.

The history of Unix dates back to the mid-1960s when the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, AT&T Bell Labs, and General Electric were developing an experimental time sharing operating system called Multics for the GE-645 mainframe.... On this PDP-7, in 1969, a team of Bell Labs researchers led by Thompson and Ritchie, including Rudd Canaday, developed a hierarchical file system, the concepts of computer processes and device files, a command-line interpreter, and some small utility programs.

It's all about privacy. Ironically everyone said the kids don't care about privacy while not realising they were leaving in herds because of privacy. It's just that their privacy concerns are more short term than ours. They are worried about being caught doing whatever it is they do by their parents, rather than what boring stuff like what future employers will know about them etc.

Why oh why did you have to write this as AC? It's the perfect analysis of the problem: Facebook is getting less popular with teens exactly because it gets more popular with older people, i.e. their parent generation.

Not only because of the ancient "It's uncool to do what your old folks are doing". You can't share your... less "parent-compatible" exploits anymore with your friends using Facebook. Because your parents are listening. Huh? You could make it "friends only" and not friend your parents? Yeah. Sure. You can not friend your parents.

So you could only use Facebook to post about your latest "family friendly" happenings. Which would pretty much double as the killer for your social life as a teen.

So of course teens move away from a service they can't use sensibly anymore.

Seems like FB's friend/non-friend division is not a good model of real life relationships! Wow! Surprise, surprise. Makes me wonder what Google did wrong with G+ to get so little popularity - the categorization of friends into separate groups and selective per-group availability of your content seemed to be among the initial assumptions (based on press releases from long time ago, I have no idea whether it works as advertised). That seems to be the right solution. Something else must have been very wrong...

Makes me wonder what Google did wrong with G+ to get so little popularity - the categorization of friends into separate groups and selective per-group availability of your content seemed to be among the initial assumptions (based on press releases from long time ago, I have no idea whether it works as advertised). That seems to be the right solution.

Well, being the right solution doesn't make a social network popular, automatically.

However, G+ has its flaws as well. Its main fault is that it is purely people-centric in terms of sharing information, and is blind to topics. I'm interested in reading about Linus Torvald's work on Linux. I'm not interested in his scuba-diving hobby. With G+ it is very difficult to get the one without the other. It requires that Linus use multiple accounts (something Google doesn't like), or that he not post publicly and maintain separate circles for the millions of people who are interested in his work on Linux vs his other hobbies.

Sure, for the little noise Linus generates I'll overlook it. However, the problem is that this does not scale up. When you want to communicate with hundreds of people it is really disruptive when many are "off-topic" much of the time. That's why mailing lists and forums enforce topic-adherence.

What Google+ really needs is the ability to not follow Linus, but to follow posts by Linus with the hashtag #linux or whatever.

I probably take a harsher stand on this than many, but the sentiment really is out there. A few months ago the rage on G+ was begging all your friends not to share their "+1's." It wasn't that people weren't interested in having access to that data. The problem was that the UI turned it into noise. Not only do I now have to read about Linus's scuba-diving, but if Linus +1's his sister's announcement of the birth of his nephew I get to read about that too. Such a thing only makes sense if you treat the network like most people treat Facebook - a place to interact with family and family-safe friends.

Seems like FB's friend/non-friend division is not a good model of real life relationships! Wow! Surprise, surprise. Makes me wonder what Google did wrong with G+ to get so little popularity - the categorization of friends into separate groups and selective per-group availability of your content seemed to be among the initial assumptions (based on press releases from long time ago, I have no idea whether it works as advertised). That seems to be the right solution. Something else must have been very wrong... Without an account on either service I can't risk a guess.

Google forces users to use real names.

Google tries to TRICK you into adding real information.

Then when you do, locks it up with all your other Google type service accounts; youtube. gmail, etc.

And follows it up by taking away a bunch of tools IN those service accounts.

In return for this, you get more ads related to what they think you will buy.

It's truly insidious and very likely to poison the opinion of google in any half-aware tech person.

Meanwhile, google makes it easy for the nigh-facist government to scoop up all the data. (Which, might not bother you now, but could when a different congress and a different president get in control who later decide you shouldn't be allowed to be free of IRS audits due to your beliefs on drug use.)

That's just what I picked up by reading here and other places about google+. I am never going to use it, and I instruct anybody who asks never to use it.

Yes, I do have a FB account. I signed on to FB when it was brand new (just like I sign on to/. when it was brand new) but I do not like what people do there --- they TELL EVERYBODY EVERYTHING ABOUT THEMSELVES.

I am not interested to know who eat what at where, nor interested to tell anyone what I do at what place in what time either.

I logged on to my FB account for 2 times since I signed on. Yes, exactly two times, and no more.

No, your friends of family post about EVERYTHING, not everyone. Of course your post just screams of the old "I don't even have a TV".

Is there something wrong with not owning a device for which you have little or no use? Should those people buy a TV just to earn your goodwill? Are you really that important? If they buy one just for you, can they send you the bill?

Now if someone says or unambiguously implies ("I feel really emotional about it!" does not satisfy "unambiguously") something along the lines of "I don't own a TV, and that makes me so much better than you!", well, that would be one thing. In the absence of such objective

BBS were cool, well not really i nthe general sense. Then AOL was cool, you saw a aol keyword on everything, on all commercials etc. Than it was myspace, everyone had to be on myspace. then it was FB, everyone had to have a FB, then twitter, you see #this and #that everywhere. Looks like snapchat is next.

I know im getting old because I am behind the curve with snapchat, Ive heard of it, have no idea what it is, dont really care, every thing prior listed I remember being involved with in some way shape or

I signed up to twitter, I still have my account, but honestly I don't think I ever looked at twitter after creating an account, I'm not even sure what my username is.

Communication is personal, not "lets spam the world with my words". I have a phone, I text and call people I actually want to communicate with. I have skype and IRC for online / casual discussions with people who aren't in my immediate world. Forums and mailing lists for more technical and important things. Email covers everything else.

Needless to say, with the above tools at my, far more appropriate disposal - there's literally no need, want, or remote desire for facebook, nor twitter. Nor was there ever.

Naw, a real grumpy old man like me wouldn't bother with skype, IRC, etc. Email is good enough for almost everything, voice phone calls covers the rest. Occasionally google+ to see what some people are up to (at least you can divide people into groups, though it still lacks the vital -1 button).

I noticed the decline about three years ago, which was about the peak of user interaction. That was probably the point of max data, when you could use it to look up just about any classmate or former co-worker you were curious about and see pictures of their kids and where they were going to be. Then people stopped being stupid, more and more profiles became private or friends-only, facebook started requiring a login to even see content on their site, real names were required and dubious names autodeleted (

I don't think there's any one place - yet - that has the cachet Facebook (and MySpace before that) once had. Among my daughter's circle of friends (all in their early 20s), though, it appears Tumblr is the new Facebook. And she's told me before the only reason she has a Facebook account at all is to keep in touch with her older relatives.

Of course I like to respond that I quit Facebook before it was cool.:-P At which point she invariably rolls her eyes and says "DA-ad..."

Yes, you are too old to have avoided joining FB in the first place. You are also missing what the policies and practices are with respect to how your posts may show up on other's pages. Even if someone is not in your group to distribute 'likes' and comments to, if you are posting a comment to or 'liking' a 'public' post, that post will randomly be posted to anyone who is a friend.

I suspect it's mostly a way to 'encourage' friends to like what their friends like, but it basicly means that you don't have the

Dude, I appreciate your efforts to restrict your children's online activity with an emphasis on interpersonal contact and physical activity, however you've gone way too far. I can assure you that this will backfire in a big way, the only thing you will achieve is to alienate yourself from your kids if you insist on your hardline position. Loosen up a bit mate, be their friend and mentor, not their "restrictions and monitoring" overseer.

When I was in school I saw this quite a bit (parents forcing their viewpoint to the detriment of their kids).

Trying to impart good values has to be balanced by reality. I too don't get a lot of this "phone culture" stuff. It drives me crazy to be at a restaurant with a bunch of people from _my_ generation all with their phones out instead of actually talking. That said, this is the reality we live in, it's becoming a necessary skill to fit in socially.

Robbing a kid of the ability to socialize in their generations preferred medium because the parents thinks it's rubbish is just asking for problems later in life.